'Dante' author as complex as his subject

By Rhonda Shafner
Associated Press

Author Nick Tosches "writes like a killer," says literary agent Chris Calhoun.

It is the voice of a man who has lived hard, a man unafraid, a man who has seen much of the world.

He laughs little, smiles rarely. But he will talk to you about almost anything, sometimes telling you more than you expected — maybe even more than you wanted to know.

Nick Tosches, 52, biographer, novelist, journalist, former music critic for Rolling Stone and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is a complicated and provocative man. Literary agent Chris Calhoun, a friend, has described him as "a very tough dude" who "writes like a killer."

His subjects tend to be complex people: rock 'n' roll "sinner" Jerry Lee Lewis, convicted felon and Sicilian financier Michele Sindona, mob-connected boxer Sonny Liston.

The mob looms large in all three of Tosches' novels. "Cut Numbers" (1988) involves a Mafia scheme to fix the New York state lottery. "Trinities" (1994) unspools the battle between Italian gangsters and Asian drug lords.

His third and latest is a story not just about wise guys but also about wise men. Called "In the Hand of Dante," publisher Little, Brown and Company has given it a 75,000-copy first printing.

Half of it takes place in the early 14th century and features "the god" Dante, as Tosches puts it. The other half takes place in the 21st century and features a character named Nick Tosches. Both Dante and Tosches search for what is most important in life and literature.

Seeing the real Nick Tosches face to face is almost shocking. The photo selected for his latest book shows a strong-looking man with carefully combed hair, dressed stylishly. And though Tosches has written about his diabetes — he dropped 60 pounds in three months — it is still surprising to see how much he has changed.

With his hair graying and buzzed to a crewcut, he looks like an older, narrower version of his former self. Not bony, not concave, but certainly more compact.

Tosches is in the conference room at Little, Brown one recent hot day. He is wearing a white embroidered guayabera, a Cuban-designed shirt that is light and airy. With the air-conditioning turned down low — the building is trying to conserve energy — Tosches has buttoned only two of his buttons. Diabetes or not, he is chain-smoking Camels.

He has been written off for dead more than once in his life and has described at least half of his life as "a blur" — drunk and "doped out."

These days, though, he is just "an expensive wino," who particularly enjoys Cheval Blanc, a mere $2,000 for a 1982 bottle. And with a 50 percent chance of surviving diabetes, Tosches spends $10,000 a year for his midtown Manhattan gym membership, trying to keep up his health.

He is a man who likes to spend money. And the hefty advances he receives for his books, slip quickly through his fingers. Five years ago, he started out with $1 million and ended up broke — "the money spent living the way I live ... plus all the traveling and research."

For "Dante," he traveled through Italy and to Sicily, where he lived alone for three months writing on an island off the coast. He also visited Ravenna, where Dante spent time in exile, died and is buried. And he traveled to an Italian town where paper used in the 14th century is still being manufactured.

Tosches, who reads classical Greek, Latin, and medieval Italian, became aware of Dante through his father who had never read the poet's work, but certainly knew the famous line: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," the inscription Dante gave to the entrance to hell.

"I think one day he made a sign like that and hung it over the entrance to a bar where he worked at," Tosches jokes.

Tosches grew up working in his father's New Jersey bars. He never attended college and later moved to lower Manhattan. He wrote interviews and reviews for rock magazines, selling his first article when he was 19. He has written major features for Vanity Fair, including his 2000 report, "Confessions of an Opium-Seeker," which was later published as a book, "The Last Opium Den."

He still has family in Jersey City and roots in Puglia, southern Italy.

And he laments the passing of the vanishing neighborhood and especially the underworld side of it. It was where he wrote five books on a stolen typewriter — a blue IBM Selectric — and got to know people in "the rackets." It was where he also began to learn about Dante, eventually becoming "enamored" with the great writer and the "immense notion" of a man who would attempt to capture heaven and hell.

Somehow Tosches found a way to mention Dante in nearly all of his books, including his first in 1977, "Country," about country music. Other works include "Hellfire," a 1982 book about Jerry Lee Lewis and "The Devil and Sonny Liston," which came out two years ago.

"In the Hand of Dante" was building up inside him for a long time — "The Dante thing," as he calls it. He says he was "trying to see Dante as a human being. ... After 700 years, he turned into a god."

At the same time, he grew increasingly disillusioned, angry and frustrated with publishing.

In one of the "Tosches" chapters, he writes that the publishing industry is growing "every day more devastating in its mediocrity," controlled by business departments that market all books with the same hype as oral-hygiene products.

He finds the hype on his own novel "inevitable."

Michael Pietsch, who has worked as Tosches' editor for 20 years, calls the author "an incredibly straightforward person," someone who speaks his mind "as directly and as painfully as may be necessary." Pietsch said Tosches is provocative and suspects that Tosches may see "as much evil in some of these corporate organizations as some that are outright criminal enterprises.

"Who he is as a person is a very, very deep well," Pietsch says. "It's a lot to try to learn in a short amount of time."